School Tours & Education

School Tours

The Accokeek Foundation offers educational tours that supplement social studies and environmental education in the classroom. Through interactive experience-based tours, students examine the differences between past and present time, and learn how decisions about our daily lives can impact the environment. These programs help to show the effects of human interaction with the land while encouraging physical activity in an outdoor living classroom.

Tour Options

A perfect way to integrate history and environmental science, Eco-Explorers: Colonial Time Warp is not a tour; it’s an adventure!

As members of a specially appointed Eco-Explorer team, students are engaged in a very important mission to save the earth and change the course of history! A problem arises in real time when the Eco-Explorer team learns that a group of well-meaning time travelers have recently transported back to the year 1770 to give one family several modern objects that will make their lives easier. But, if left on the farm, some of these objects could set in motion a chain of events that destroys the environment for future generations.

It’s up to the Eco-Explorer team to zoom back to 1770 to recover these items and replace them with colonial items that serve the same function. Along the way they will carefully weigh the positive and negative effects of the modern conveniences to decide whether to confiscate the objects. To make matters more complicated, the Eco-Explorers run into real-life characters who will challenge decisions that the students make and humanize the impact of these decisions. In the process, they learn valuable lessons about the pace and practices of everyday life in a very different era.

The essential question explored in this program is one that we all ask ourselves every day, but which has no easy answer:

Which modern inventions are worth the environmental impact that they have?

By the end of this program, students come to learn that we may not have the technology to travel back in time, but by making eco-friendly decisions, they do have the power to change the future.